Friday, February 5, 2010

Tooling to help you starting a code generator from an example - To go Further...

Few weeks ago Cedric Brun announced a new way to create in a few minutes a pragmatic code generator with Acceleo. He said that Acceleo provides a specific tooling to help you starting a code generator from an example :

the new file wizard with the option to initialize it with an existing file content

the search & replace smart completion to quickly transform the example to a real template we can apply on a model

the "for" closing brace completion auto-magically find a coherent place

Since his message, we have added several menu items to go further :

"Refactor > Extract As Template..." to create a new template with the selected text

"Source > As Protected Area..." to define a protected area where we can regenerate target files without losing any modification

"Quickfix" when an operation call doesn't compile, you can create a new template or a new query that make the compilation work